The “Long Tail” of the “Search Demand Curve”

In the “head” of the curve, we have a few keywords with an extremely high search volume. But they hardly account for even 10% of all searches.

SIDENOTE. In case you’re wondering, those two 100M+ keywords are “youtube” and “facebook.”

And at the “tail” of the curve, we have a monstrous pile of keywords with miserable search volume. But they account for almost 40% of all searches.

To actually see this long tail on a graph, we need to plot all our keywords on the X-axis in the order of decreasing monthly search volume.

The real graph wouldn’t look very pretty because of its scale, so we’ve created a slightly modified visual representation instead:

How to take advantage of the long tail

So roughly around 40% of all searches are coming from billions of long-tail keywords that have less than 50 searches per month.

There should be a way to use this to your advantage, right?

Well, there is such a way!

Look at this page, which ranks #3 for the keyword “website traffic”:

The search volume of the keyword “website traffic” is almost 10,000 searches per month. So if you rank #3 for it, you can expect about 10% of that traffic at best, which is only 1,000 visitors per month.

But Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer shows that this page is bringing almost 7,000 visitors per month. And this traffic is generated by nearly 600 keywords that it ranks for in organic search results.

That is long-tail traffic in all its glory.

Let’s put the URL of this page in Site Explorer and see all these long-tail keywords that it ranks for:

It looks like people invent hundreds of peculiar ways to ask pretty much the same question. Google understands it and ranks exactly the same page for all these search queries.

So by looking at the search volume of an individual keyword, you can’t make a good prediction of the total search traffic potential of your page. You have to examine the top-ranking pages and see how much search traffic they are generating from long tail.

The same principle applies to researching the keywords your competitors rank for.

If you look at the best keywords that send traffic to IncomeDiary.com, you probably wouldn’t pay attention to the keyword “how do websites make money” because it has only 800 searches per month:

But if you look at which pages send them the most traffic from search, you’ll see this:

This page is bringing them a ton of highly targeted search traffic, all because of the numerous long-tail keywords it ranks for.

Think long tail

I’m pretty sure that most of the takeaways from our research didn’t come as a surprise for you. They’re quite intuitive, after all.

But, at the same time, I see way too many people overlooking the power of long tail and focusing on search volumes of individual keywords (as if it’s 2010).

So let me know if you had an “AHA” moment while reading this post, and if you’re now going to rethink your SEO strategy with long-tail keywords in mind.